Background
Few elections in Zimbabwe and Africa pass
without charges of vote rigging and manipulation. This article advances the
argument that embracing new, simple and cost-effective technology can provide a
solution to some of the problems afflicting the electoral process.
Concerns have been raised in past elections
about ‘zombie’ (deceased voters apparently ‘voting’ from the grave), individuals
engaging in double or multiple voting and inflated voting figures. It is
important that allegations and the incidence of fraud, double or multiple voting,
etc raised in the last presidential and parliamentary elections are not
repeated in the next crucial elections.
A growing number of countries such as Ghana,
Zambia, South Africa, Nigeria, Namibia, and Mozambique among others have either
started using biometrics in the election process or are preparing to do so in
the near future. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, the body charged with the
constitutional role of conducting and supervising elections in Zimbabwe, should
seriously consider investing in biometrics technology, particularly when it
takes charge of voter registration and maintenance of the voters’ rolls.
The election process does not begin and end on
the actual polling day. The polling day might be the climax of the process but
for every individual voter, the voting process actually begins at the point of
registration to vote. At that point, new eligible voters register for the first
time or existing voters verify that they are registered. This is an understated
but critical stage of the voting process because unless one is registered he or
she will not be able to exercise his or her constitutional right to vote. The
main rationale for registering is to confirm the eligibility of the person as a
voter and to ensure the correct identity of the voter. It means that only the
person who is registered and whose details correspond to the details on the
voters’ roll can vote.
In the past there have been problems with the
voter registration exercise and the voters’ roll. There has been criticism that
the voters’ roll is a shambles – persons who are long deceased are still on the
voters’ rolls; the details of voters are sometimes missing or incorrect – the
accuracy of the voters’ roll has been widely questioned. The result has been
allegations of ‘ghost voters’ and the disenfranchisement of otherwise eligible
voters who discover on election day that they are not registered; that their
details are missing or incorrectly recorded, etc. This is a clear denial of the
constitutional right to vote.
It follows, however, that voter identity and
accuracy of voter details are critical aspects of the voting process which can
affect the entire election. As this paper argues, establishing the correct
identity of the voter can be easily and cheaply solved by investing in
biometrics technology. The right to vote is a very basic right for
which the liberation struggle was waged – therefore it is vital that it be
facilitated and protected from fraudulent conduct.
A new voter registration and voting system
based on biometrics can and should be introduced in Zimbabwe. It is important
to give a brief and basic overview of biometrics and how it works.
Biometrics Overview
As
human beings we easily recognise each other by observing the way we look and
processing this information in our brains. We do so sub-consciously by
collecting a variety of information, processing it in our brains and reaching a
conclusion about the identity of individuals. We gather information about for
example, a person’s height (‘murefu/mupfupi’
– short/tall’), body size (‘mukobvu/mutete’
– fat/thin), even about ears/eyes size (ane mazinzeve mahombe/ ane maziso mahombe’ – he has big ears /large eyes) etc
which enable us to recognise individual. Biometrics is simply an attempt by a
‘computer’ to do similar things.
However, in
order for the computer to do so, it has to be presented with information
regarding an individual’s physical or behavioural properties in a language
which it understands such as numerical distance between the eyes, the
depth/size of the nose, size of the mouth, etc. Of course, more complex data is
gathered in practice, but it is not the aim of this article to go deep into the
complexities of biometrics.
Biometrics - identification based on
distinctive personal traits, has the potential to become an irreplaceable part
of any identification system in all spheres in the long term. Biometric
identifiers cannot be shared, misplaced, and they intrinsically represent the
individual's identity. This is technology which many have now embraced and is geared
towards making society safer, to minimise fraudulent activities and improve
convenience.
In general and which is important for our
present purposes, biometrics can be used for positive identification, that is, to prove
that an individual is who they claim to be. It can also be used on a large
scale to verify whether the person is in the database or not. Biometrics can also be used for screening
people, for example, to check whether someone is on a police “wanted list” or
to prevent/allow access to facilities. The simplest and most basic form of biometric
screening can be seen at a nursery school where security of children is of
utmost importance. The door to the nursery playing area would be high enough to
allow toddlers to run through, but would be too short for an adult to pass
through. The biometric trait being utilised here is ‘height’.
The
key step in the biometrics process is for a user of the system to be enrolled
(registered) by having their biometrics captured and stored. This essentially means
giving the computer the physical measurements of the individual to enable it to
recognise the individual in the future. This can be the individual’s fingerprint,
iris of the eye, face or voice. Positive identification (also called authentication or verification)
verifies the authenticity of the identity claimed. For example, a person
claims that he is Nelson Mandela to the authentication system and offers his
fingerprint; the system then either agrees or disagrees with the claim by
comparing what is in store and what has been presented. Now, in the voting
process, this technology can be applied to eliminate the issue of ‘ghost’ or
‘zombie’ voters where a living person tries to vote using a deceased person’s identity,
therefore enabling him/her to fraudulently cast multiple votes.
For
checking whether a user is in a database, an input biometric sample is
presented to the system which determines if the pattern is associated
with any of a large number of enrolled identities. In this voting
process, this can answer the question of whether or not one is a registered
voter.
Biometrics
can also be used for screening users. Screening applications can covertly and
unobtrusively determine whether a person belongs to a ‘wanted’ list. In the
voting process, this can be used to determine whether one is prohibited from
voting – for example because he or she is disqualified from voting for any
reason.
Some examples of usage of biometrics in modern
gadgets are computers/phones were you can login using your fingerprint, cars
which you can open and start using your fingerprint and phones which can
recognise your voice. A lot of advanced countries have also now adopted
biometric passports which have a chip containing an individual’s face and
fingerprint information. It makes it easier to check, verify and establish
identify more efficiently than using the traditional procedures.
Biometrics Devices
In general, biometric devices consist of a reader or scanning device (this captures the biometric information, a simple example being a camera), some software that converts the scanned information into digital form (information or in a language that can be ‘understood’ by a computer’) and a database that stores the biometric data for comparison (to later compare and prove that the individual presenting the biometric information is indeed the person whose information is stored).
To convert the biometric input, a software
application (a computer program) is used to identify specific characteristics
of the data (such as distance between the eyes, skin texture, distance between
eyes and centre of nose etc for example in face recognition) as match points.
The match points in the database are processed using a computer program that
translates that information into a numeric value. The database value is
compared with the biometric input the end user has entered into the scanner and
authentication is either approved or denied. The level of security can be
changed by adjusting certain values in the computer programs to make it more
difficult for impostors to be accepted by the system depending on where the
biometric system is used.
Biometrics in Action
The regular reference to computing technology
might cause some to imagine that this is implausible and impracticable in the
context of a developing country whose level of technological sophistication is
limited. I will conclude this part with a few comments on how good and
effective the technology is.
Although this might be overlooked fingerprint
technology has been widely used for years in electoral process and policing.
Error rates vary considerably between vendors and a small percentage of people
are unable to use these systems at all because of unsuitable fingerprints. The
main advantage of this method, however, is that people have multiple fingers,
each with a different fingerprint. By requiring the use of multiple
fingerprints, error rates can be reduced for those able to use the system.
Experiments have been carried out using fingerprints and the number of genuine
users falsely rejected on multiple attempts can be as low as 1 in 100 000
cases. The chances of imposters being accepted can be as low as 0. One has to
be really determined to cheat the system to try several times for acceptance,
especially given that measures will be in place to arrest and prosecute such
individuals, therefore the chances of that happening can be as low as 0%.
Whilst working for the University of Kent, the
writer took part in a 3-year multi-national EU Project on 3D Face Recognition
for automatic border control. The project involved several key players in the
security technology industry including Sagem Sécurité, Bundesdruckerei (German
Security Company), Philips Research, Cognitec, L-1, Polygon Technology,
Fraunhofer IGD, Hochschule Darmstadt, Computer Graphics Centre, University of
Twente, Berlin Airport, National Research Council, Bundeskriminalamt (German
Police), Salzburg Airport and Joint Research Centre. More information regarding
this project can be obtained from www.3dface.org.
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| 3DFace Project: Liveness testing at Salzburg Airport |
In this project 3D facial data was collected at
the University of Kent, at Sagem in France and the Centre for Graphics and
Computer Vision in Germany. Practical trials were carried out at Berlin Airport
and Salzburg Airport which included “liveness tests”, that is testing whether
someone had presented a proper picture or a dummy. The results showed that the
chance of someone being falsely rejected by the system was less than 2% and for
someone being falsely accepted by the system was less than 0.25%. This was by
using face information only in an automated way; results which can be improved
by human intervention. Improvements can be obtained by combining information
from different biometrics or different algorithms to reach a decision on whether
to accept or reject a voter
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| Prof Raymond Veldhuis (Biometrics Expert; Netherlands), Alexander Nouak (Director: Computer Graphics Centre, Germany) and Dr Samuel Chindaro at the EU Commission Biometrics Review meeting in Salzburg |
Adopting this technology can lead the way for
integration of Electronic Voting, which is a different topic beyond the scope
of this article suffice to state that it can help to improve speed in the
electoral process through facilitating instant counting of votes and therefore
elimination of the risk of manipulation. For example, an electronic voting
system was launched in Brazil back in the middle 1990’s, rapidly becoming an
international benchmark because of its accuracy, accountability and security. The
results of the elections of 2008, when more than 130 million Brazilian citizens
in 5.560 municipalities voted, were officially informed just 3 hours after its
closure.
In the next part, I will delve specifically
into the use of biometrics technology in the voting process and also discuss
the important issue of feasibility of using this technology in the context of
Zimbabwe.
